broadcom

It does, but chances are Broadcom won't sell you the SoC either so it matters less than you think.

The standard, of course, is going to be exactly what Broadcom has already implemented.

I wonder how much IP in the BCM2835 and BCM2836 SoC actually belongs to Broadcom vs 3rd parties?

I expect it's mostly just aimed at anyone who attempts to re-purpose existing hardware based on the same Broadcom SoC.

Oddly enough, the Broadcom wireless one of them uses had problems, but that's about all the problems I had (and that Broadcom was a source of grief for a long time under Linux).

Then again, Broadcom liked to buy things, for example ServerWorks, Renesas, Netlogic (which in turn had acquired RMI, etc).

Fun offtopic fact: My copper phone line is so bad I can only use specific Broadcom based modems if I want >5Mbit download speeds.

The only tricky bit (as other comments have pointed out) was the wireless device driver, which I had to download from the Broadcom website.

There are plenty of other viable Broadcom Trident based gear etc out there that is used at huge scale (see Quanta) that if you use aftermarket firmware actually works really well.

This summarizes the deal: >As of 2014, Broadcom had $3.13 billion of cash and cash equivalents held by its foreign subsidiaries, and it deferred about $4.85 billion in tax on un-repatriated foreign earnings, according to SEC filings.

The load balancer folks and some of the "Network Packet Brokers" have roadmap or the beginnings of this but it'd be better to have on Broadcom...

Trying to get anything from Broadcom is worse than "pulling teeth from a chook" - I've had better success with small Chinese companies like AllWinner.

They just conveniently avoid paying any US taxes on a "shitload" (technical term) of income, because they aren't a US company - and Broadcom has avoided repatriating income for precisely this reason.

Or, an even more basic thing would be to have not per-packet sampling+sFlow like Broadcom and other chips do, but also a primitive for "flow sampling" to get all packets for 1/Nth of flows (say, 1/1000th) to get sampled such decodes up on a daemon running on say Cumulus or Arista.

On top of this, every automotive ethernet is Broad-R-Reach which is Broadcom's 2-Wire Ethernet and to tap into it requires expensive demo boards from Broadcom.

Stay away from anything Broadcom, AMD, Radeon and pick a decent SSD (Samsung 840 pro here) it's bomb proof.

Why would TRW have given away such resources and IP to what would become Broadcom?